Hell's Door Coffin

Introduction: Hell's Door Coffin

Two days ago I woke up and a voice told me: "Build a coffin and make people go through it with a smile. Then, your party will rock".

Well, what should I do, ignore that voice? Obviously not! So let's get to it.

Step 1: Collecting Materials

We decided to use pallets as the primary material source, so we had to un-nail several of them... which takes a lot of time. On the other hand, if you use old pallets your coffin will have a kind of an old, beated look, which is nice in this case. If the pallets are of different models, this will improve even more the final look!

You will also need two hinges for the door and some kind of handle. Obviously the build will take tons of nails and screws.

Step 2: Shaping the Coffin

Once you decided how big you want it to be you can start cutting the boards. We used the frames of the pallets as frames for the coffin and nailed the boards directly onto them. This helped us to make everything symmetrical. The joints were made just by screwing everything together. If you have patience, you can cut wooden joints and make everything more rigid, but we didn't have much time, so... we just added a bunch of screws everywhere.

If you add rigidity to the structure, you will have less problems later when positioning it.

Step 3: Making the Door

Once you have your coffin shaped, making the door should be pretty easy. Again, we used only ex-pallet materials.

Position a bed of boards under the coffin and hold them together with more boards. The idea was to use some kind of random pattern when positioning the patches, to give it a cursed look. You should give the door some rigidity, since you want it to be used without breaking in less than 10'.

Then just draw the shape of the coffin and cut to measure the door. Again, try not to be super precise, you don't want it to look perfect.

Step 4: Detailing

Now is the moment to add the hinges and the handle. We didn't had any hinges, so we built our own, as you can see. The look very primitive and rusty... which is perfect. The handle is very cursed too, obviously.

In the end we decided to write something on the door. The best looking solution would be to use a hot iron to burn the surface but, again, we didn't have much time... so we used an angle grinder to carve the wood. You can see in the photos that we wrote a word and made some kind of diabolic logo (my brother wanted to do it). The final look was really cool.

Step 5: Positioning

The last thing is to position it on your front door. We had some problems making it stay up, because the structure was not rigid at all. Anyway after some problem-solving the situation went well. Most advice would be useless in this case, since it mostly depends on the dimensions and shape of both your door and coffin, but part of the solution was to tie it to the wall.

Step 6: Conclusions

We had a lot of fun building it and our friends really appreciated all the effort! All our neighbours came here taking photos and we received a lot of compliments. The final result was really satisfying for us, being also that the build took just one day!

The whole point is about having fun, isn't it? So I think we really nailed it.

Hope you liked the idea! If you have suggestions write us a comment and don't forget to post the photos of your builds, next year!